Um. I can only offer a bit of personal observation here, not verified from a reliable source.

QWなの seems to be a pretty common conversational pattern. I was just watching Juon and noticed that a character following a little boy upstairs, in a house where no little boy ought to be, says "誰？誰なの？" I suppose it means "Who is that?" or maybe, "Who are you?" So "何なの？" ought to mean, "What is that?"

Another expression for the same thing that I have seen is "何なんだ？"

Also, the の functioning to mark a question is pretty common, as in "何してるの？" "What are you doing?" You can substitute another verb for する, such as 何食べてるの？ (What are you eating?)

Again, I don't get a lot of chance to hear or practice informal Japanese conversation, but these are things I've noticed. (If anyone knows a good book on this sort of informal 口語, I'd love to know about it!)

Shira

"Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself." -- Vilfredo Pareto

That ending is usually asking for an explaination. Like if you say 何ですか？ you are asking what that is, but if you say 何ですの？ you are asking for an explaination of what that is too. (Having just a の sounds kind of feminine, so if your a guy you add a だ at the end.).

well yes it seems that the question is more of a speech pattern rather than a rule like :

私は何なんだ <- What am I (to you, or to this community etc etc)
also "isn't it <thing in question>"
like :
あれは車なの？
thanks for the conversation guys I finally remembered also ... verb+n+speech pressure stemmed from
verb + no form

それでも 行くんだな？<- それでも 行くの？ (Still you want to go? or something like that) || Taken from Onimusha 3

Okay, nobody here has really explained it properly, so here's how it is:

In Japanese, in order to try to convey strong emotions, or make someone feel empathy for you (or something like that) you add -n, or no to the END of the verb or adjective, no matter what tense it is in. This is indeed a VERY common sentence structure, and some people almost always use it. It's also commonly used in order to make it more clear that you're asking a question when you use the short form of a verb. For example, if I REALLY wanted a stuffed animal, and wanted to have the listener understand how much I wanted one, I'd say...
Nuigurumi ga hoshiin desu instead of Nuigurumi ga hoshii desu. Using -no instead of -n means the exact same thing, but is a little more formal. The same thing applies to verbs.
The making a question more clear works sort of like this...
If you were to say 'osushi o taberu' it could be a question about whether you ate sushi depending on how you said it. To make it more clear that it's a question, many people will say 'osushi o taberun desu ka'. This way still carries a bit more emotional weight than the first way, but it's used very frequently.

The 'nan node' example you mentioned is the exception. Specifically with -na nouns, such as genki, kirei, shizuka, etc. When you want to do this after one of those, you use -nan instead of just -n or no. 'Node' is simply another, more emotional version of using 'kara' to mean because of this. So saying something like... 'byoki nan node' would be a very sad, appealing way to say 'beacuse I am feeling sick'.

Hope that helped.

Last edited by xdj220 on Fri 05.20.2005 4:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.